Microsoft has announced that it is to make some significant changes to the Windows 8 user interface, including dropping the Aero Glass effect that was first introduced in Windows Vista.
This announcement was made by Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for Microsoft's User Experience team, over on the Building Windows 8 Blog.
Aero gave the appearance of highly-rendered glass, light sources, reflections, and other graphically complex textures in the title bars, taskbar, and other system surfaces. The effect, which was purely cosmetic, allowed the desktop, icons and windows that were hidden beneath other windows to show through the surround of the application.
In Windows 8, these effects will be removed, replaced instead with a flatter, more neutral look. Here is the only screenshot of the changes that Microsoft has made available.
I was never a huge fan of the Aero Glass interface so I won't be sad to see it go, but there's more to this change than aesthetics. And that reason is power efficiency.
Back when Microsoft released Windows Vista, the dominant platform for Windows was the desktop PC. Yes, notebooks existed, but they were still quite a niche platform. Desktop systems spend all their working life plugged in to what is essentially an unlimited power source, so it didn't really matter how much power a system consumed.
Aero was born from this thinking.
To power the effects of Aero, Microsoft has to make use of the system's Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), and this made the effect quite system intensive. On a desktop system this didn't matter, because extra power consumed by the GPU goes unnoticed. However, on a portable system that has to rely on the battery, power becomes a precious commodity. Switching Windows Vista or Windows 7 to low-power mode would automatically disable the Aero effect and revert to the Classic look.
And this was the problem facing Microsoft engineers as they battled to make Windows 8 suited for a whole raft of new, low-power devices such as tablets and ultrabooks. Did they continue to switch between Aero and Classic look whenever the device switched between being on main power and battery power, or did they settle on one user interface? It seems that Microsoft has decided to settle on a single look.
Eliminating Aero won't just save power. Taking the workload off the GPU will mean that the system will have to deal with less heat, another factor that's important to portable device, especially thin and light systems.
Microsoft also said that only a few of the visual changes in Windows 8 will be present in the Release Preview scheduled for release next month. To see them all we will have to wait for the final release of Windows 8.
